


Who Tells Your Story

by angeloncewas



Series: a divine gift or curse [3]
Category: Dream SMP - Fandom, Minecraft (Video Game)
Genre: 5+1 Things, But it’s ambiguous, Canonical Character Death, Dialogue Light, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Character Death, Introspection, Minor Cara | CaptainPuffy/Niki Nihachu, References to Ancient Greek Religion & Lore, Sort Of, This is so difficult to tag, Unbeta'd
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-04
Updated: 2021-03-04
Packaged: 2021-03-17 11:49:04
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,430
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29841090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/angeloncewas/pseuds/angeloncewas
Summary: TommyInnit dies; the world reacts.(five times he changed everything and one time nothing was any different / five sets of people who feel his impact and one that simply lets him go)-Tommy is a statistical anomaly. He looks at you and sees family, sees enemy, sees friend, and no matter what label you have been given, you mean something.
Relationships: Cara | CaptainPuffy & Niki | Nihachu, Dream SMP Ensemble & TommyInnit, Kristin Rosales Watson/Phil Watson, Minor or Background Relationship(s), Technoblade & Phil Watson (Video Blogging RPF)
Series: a divine gift or curse [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2195631
Comments: 10
Kudos: 135





	Who Tells Your Story

**Author's Note:**

> Don't worry if this isn't your style :) it's kinda abstract, but I do hope you'll give it a shot

**i.**

There is a way to the world, a natural order of things. The church stands on land that violence cannot touch. Items have value and are not meant to be stolen. The world is built off of itself and that means that every person is its keeper.

There are a set of unspoken rules, and not once has Tommy respected a single one.

That’s the thing, isn’t it? The thing that drives power to its fringes and pushes for more; this world has not been unified since its inception. Not since a girl placed a hand on her barn door and whispered a goodbye to people long-lost. Way before Technoblade and Phil came, two sides of the same outlook, death’s champions who do not belong. Way before Wilbur seized a plot with nimble hands. Way before Ranboo wandered in with a missing past.

There are countries, there are allies, there is no true unity. Not anymore.

An entire world can never be a family, there’s too many people with too much to say.

Once, it was an octet and they called each other home, but now the ground comes with labels and Callahan has stopped sitting on the edge of the Holy Land because even that is corrupt. 

Yet, as with all things, Tommy is an exception.

Tommy is a statistical anomaly. He looks at you and sees family, sees enemy, sees friend, and no matter what label you have been given, you mean something. You matter. Your name has been written in the history books. His vice-presidential campaign had his enemy’s best friend’s name woven into the pages just as much as his own.

He thinks himself the center of everything, so he is. He makes himself so.

When Tommy dies, the world collapses in on itself.

* * *

**ii.**

Fundy and Quackity left separately, and for different reasons, but they arrive home back-to-back.

Both of them have been away and apart for so much time - seconds, hours, days, weeks - that Quackity points out how good Fundy looks and startles when he’s answered with a smile.

The fox speaks of a man he met during travel, love unlike what anyone’s ever shown him. The distance served Fundy well; he does not spare a second glance toward the place that once set him spiralling.

Quackity, meanwhile, comes back with a cane and grim determination.

Two-fourths of the Butcher Army, opposite ends of a sliding scale, they are not the same. Quackity would call himself _human_ where Fundy would call himself _better,_ but they still both freeze like deer when Jack Manifold tells them the news.

In Fundy’s world, Tommy’s been an orange peel of a person. Bitter and hard to digest, but somehow sacred. Tommy always held the positions Fundy wanted. He led L’manberg’s charge, he carried Wilbur’s love and adoration in his pocket, he was handed Fundy’s country before their leader left them both behind.

This time, Tommy is the one to leave.

“Is there a funeral?” Fundy asks.

His father never got one, though that sort of depends on the context. Fundy carries Schlatt’s sword in his scabbard and he’s always had a feeling that it’s the only reason Quackity has never picked a fight.

Jack Manifold shifts, like the weight in his body isn’t quite right. He’s been unsteady for ages now and it seems to have only gotten worse. “I don’t know. It just happened, like, an hour ago.”

No one comments on Quackity’s sharp inhale, a living thing, fragile in its emergence. Unlike Fundy, he wasn’t running away from anything. He was working, he had plans. Part of the reason he came back was for Tommy.

There’s always been respect between them, even when everything started to fall apart and it wasn’t up to Quackity to put it back together. He got to say goodbye then, when Tommy decided to charge into battle with the knowledge that he might not come back.

This is different.

Tommy hadn’t gone willingly. There was no pause for final thoughts.

Quackity can’t help but feel like if he had just made it in time - weeks, days, hours, seconds - Tommy might be alive.

* * *

**iii.**

They say there are two sides to every story. It’s a cliche of a thing, and it doesn’t hold up in a place where every person watches the same sunset and sees a different color, but Niki and Puffy are almost enough to make it true.

They’ve always stood on opposite sides. Even prior to the tentative peace shattering, even with their silent promises and everything else that comes with tying a red string around your own finger.

To their coin flip of fate, Niki is tails. The lost piece of a lizard in fear, she has long left the others behind. Niki gathers flowers not for a memorial and sleeps within a fairy’s nightmares.

When she was young and naive she took Wilbur’s hand and let him lead her into war. When she was older and in love she took Puffy’s and let herself be led out of it. Niki learned, through experience, not to rely on anyone but herself, but it’s still Dream of all people who’s done her job for her.

Maybe it should sting, but it doesn’t. Not any more than anything else does.

Niki has lost everything; she destroyed the last of it herself.

Let the man play-acting as a god burn down his own symbol of something that was never meant to be. Her hands itch for fire when she sees oak, now. His must crave blood in his obsidian cell. To be victorious is an addiction, even when you only think you’ve won.

Her hand reaches for Puffy’s instead of flint and steel. This is the kindness she grants herself these days. The quiet kind, the kind that could be spoken over. It’s who she used to be and she cannot be it, but she offers its pieces to the only person who deserves it.

Puffy.

Headstrong, lost at sea while landlocked, a cursed mermaid bound for nowhere.

A mother without a child, not for their loss, though it could be argued. She grieves two people she couldn’t protect, even though neither really knew her, not really.

Dream stayed at her feet like a follower and Tommy would never fall in line. Puffy knew that one would die to the other’s hand. It’s the nature of people who tether themselves together. She just always thought that the kinder of the two would be the one with the strength to do it.

Niki offers her a poppy and she cradles its brittle stem.

* * *

**iv.**

There is a dirt shack on the edge of land that belongs to everyone and to no one. At the tip of the Prime Path, on the road leading down to what was rebellion and across where Eret pretends they have authority, there is a grave without a body in it.

It belongs to both Connor and Sapnap, and neither is quite sure what to do.

They were promised it separately, for the same reasons in the end. Tommy, with his wind-ruffled hair and flyaway grin; _“if I die, you can have my house.”_

It’s still his, even if they have ownership now. They take custody of its beating heart, a ward they both asked for but aren’t prepared to bear.

Unsurprisingly, Connor is the first one to break.

“You’d use it more than I would,” he tells Sapnap, because he doesn’t need it, not really. He just wanted it when wanting things made sense and now it feels a bit like trying to fill the space of a missing person. His face isn’t the one that would be on the posters and yet he’s wearing red and the whole thing reads like a bad joke.

Connor doesn’t know Tommy, not really, and he never will, but he can’t imagine that this is what the kid was looking for.

He, for a second, allows himself to think about all the things people never reach. The futures that sit in spoken word and memory, never to come to fruition.

Then he heads out. In the end, none of this stuff really concerns him.

It does, however, concern Sapnap.

Sapnap is not like Connor, or Tommy, or even Dream. He is made of that which hurts and scalds and warms. There is fire where there should be air and blood and bone.

There was a time when he couldn’t possibly imagine a world in which his best friend kills a blond kid with too much human, too much lung and stomach and flesh, but here he is. This is that world.

Someone has planted flowers around the front door of the place and its inside is grass. It is nature that’s not his - Sapnap is disaster and this is perpetual rest - Tommy’s abandoned house looks more like a place to grow than a tomb and in some ways it’s fitting and in others it’d be comical if it didn’t ache.

He wonders what color the man he once loved will bleed; if it will be ichor or just as red as what Dream spilled for no one’s sake.

Sapnap has work to do, he has a promise to keep.

* * *

**v.**

If the prison is Pandora’s, that means Sam must be one of the gods. He built it, in the image of someone far from fair maiden, but perhaps just as powerful to fellow man.

Nothing lines up quite right. Hope isn’t meant to die in that story, there are no cliffs to suit a speech uttered by the boy’s semi-enemy, and if Sam’s an inventor blinded by ambition, then who is meant to be Icarus?

Probably not Tubbo, who has no interest in words or myths or much Sam has to offer, but maybe.

Tubbo doesn’t fly, but he does fall. He doesn’t drown, but there are burn marks splashed across his cheek and cascading down his arm.

Tubbo doesn’t believe the words Sam says to him and they may one day be his downfall, but Sam cannot push another child to a place they don’t want to go. He did it once, because he was focused on what he saw as the bigger picture, and he deserves to be trapped in his own creation as a consequence.

That story doesn’t make sense either, unless you’re meant to believe that Dream is Theseus.

Sam has failed a lot of things, but he will not let that name stand next to hero. Dream can be Minos. Judge, jury, executioner.

Tubbo wants to know _how_ and _why_ and _who,_ but in the end the myths are just stories people chose to place faith in once. Sam is not some sort of genius of legend, he is just a man. He just made a mistake, but saying that doesn’t mean anything.

A question doesn’t automatically create an answer other than a hushed “I don’t know,” and for Tubbo - former law enforcement, former revolutionary, former president, former best friend - that is not enough.

Tubbo carries his burden to Snowchester, to the home they never shared, to the place Tommy never really cared about. Tommy cared about _Tubbo._ He denounced his status as the center of everything for him, just as he was bound for death. Perhaps they switched roles there, and Tommy took the fate that was meant to be his.

 _This isn’t fair,_ Tubbo thinks. _What good am I without my sidekick?_

Theseus left Pirithous behind in the Underworld and while Tubbo’s home built of ice does not burn, he can’t help but feel like it is some kind of damnation.

* * *

**\+ i.**

In every data set there are outliers. Here, they live in the tundra, far north.

Past where Tommy almost died and Dream lost himself to something no one can put a name to, there’s a wooden shack. There’s a family that has never been apart, there is loyalty where everybody else has only known deceit. Betrayal was carved into the world long before they arrived, but their land is untouched and though they never remove their armor, it is for each other, not against.

Techno finds out first, because the voices somehow always know. He doesn’t believe them in the beginning, they have lied to him before, but even though they speak without tone something about their delivery comes out flat and he asks Phil if he’s heard any news.

Phil travels across the ocean to verify and he comes back with a nod and an unreadable expression. Something in him seems to tremble, slightly, like he’d be shaking out his wings if they still stood proud. Neither of them are sure how to feel.

It’s one thing to hate someone, to remove them from your life. No longer will you have to worry only to hurt, no longer will a reminder of your son or your loss of self or both come back with golden apples and clenched fists. You go on, you throw their letters to the dogs, you re-organize everything they messed up.

It’s another to know that no one will ever love them again, because they can’t, because no one cares for the dead, at least not on the living side of things.

They are death’s champions and they do not mourn Tommy in the way most people do. This is the way things go, and he was not someone they would risk themselves for.

They don’t cry, they don’t wallow in regret, they don’t plot revenge for a boy who, if the roles were reversed, probably wouldn’t have missed them much more than a fish misses the trees.

What Phil does is invite his wife to dinner.

Techno sighs when Phil tells him, leaving his brewing stands to put Steve in Ranboo’s house for the night. Animals tend to be skittish around her, though Edward had seemed to enjoy her presence.

She comes in cloak and scythe, a smile across her lips like she’s just been told a secret. The voices pay her little mind, they are still caught up on the _Tommy_ of it all. Almost as though they are mourning on his behalf; they clamber and complain and demand something Techno cannot give.

“Did you really have to take his soul?” he asks, digging around in a chest. Maybe they’ll listen if someone else tells them the truth.

“I don’t take souls,” Kristin chides. Her arms are bare and pale, but the chill does not reach her. She is colder than the snow and somehow twice as soft. “I just welcome them home.”

**Author's Note:**

> In the end:
> 
> \- I think this is more self-indulgent than anything, but I cried and then wrote it all in an hour or so, so  
> \- I don't know I'm happy with it overall  
> \- Remember to take care of yourself, the plotline is pretty heavy at the moment  
> \- Check out my Tumblr if you'd like! Same @, I rb a ton of cool art


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